Top 50 Ezra Furman Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Ezra Furman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I was rather obsessed with angels.

I was rather obsessed with angels.
Ezra Furman
I first got into music when I heard punk, and it was saying maybe it’s OK if you don’t live up to the expectations various authorities have for you.
Ezra Furman
I want to be a force that tries to revive the human spirit rather than crush it, to open possibilities rather than close them down. Sometimes a passionate negativity is the best way to do that.
Ezra Furman
There is something embarrassing about asking for money, but if I hadn’t done that, I would have not continued to be a professional musician.
Ezra Furman
Desperate times make for desperate songs.
Ezra Furman
I honestly feel like I’ve been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after ‘Day Of the Dog’ came out.
Ezra Furman
It’s a good feeling to not tell people what’s going on.
Ezra Furman
I could write a joke song really easily, but I think something that might be true for my generation is that there’s a certain irony or detachedness expected of us, even though we really feel sincere. So the only way to sincerity is through a joke.
Ezra Furman
I always felt like I had a punk album waiting to be made.
Ezra Furman
I think most of the work of songwriting is thinking of great phrases – I’m addicted, always on the hunt for a really great phrase.
Ezra Furman
If you get into really learning about the roots of monotheism, it was utterly a radical cultural moment. The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it.
Ezra Furman
I think of myself as someone who’s trying to be a great songwriter and a great performer. And I mean really great.
Ezra Furman
I write good songs out of fear… fear of failure. Because if they’re not good enough, you feel yourself starting to fall.
Ezra Furman
Listening to songs is like eating and writing songs is like vomiting. You’re putting a ton of stuff in, it combines in unpredictable ways, and comes back out in a big mess.
Ezra Furman
We spent a lot of time making ‘Transangelic Exodus’ and toward the end of it, my ability and my love for music – that is, just garage music, direct and immediate – started to feel neglected.
Ezra Furman
Chuck Berry invented rock ‘n’ roll. He was one of the best songwriters of the 20th century.
Ezra Furman
We need a lot more visibility of queer people in public life. People gotta get used to it.
Ezra Furman
Far from being a showbiz gimmick, for me dressing as I please has signalled the end of a lifelong performance of straightforward masculinity.
Ezra Furman
You have to be an anti-racist to not be racist. Because it’s just a cultural tide that will pull you into it if you’re not swimming against it.
Ezra Furman
A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.
Ezra Furman
Lou Reed was an ideal figure to me. He was bisexual, like me, and seemed to inhabit an ambiguous middle place on the masculine-feminine spectrum.
Ezra Furman
Not only am I a shy person, I take a little while to say what I mean, especially in a social situation, and usually those move too fast for me to say anything at all.
Ezra Furman
You have to make a character of yourself if you’re going to be known to strangers.
Ezra Furman
I want to make the greatest record ever made. It’s the only thing I can think about.
Ezra Furman
I think I’m becoming a climate activist.
Ezra Furman
I am frustrated at misconceptions of me, and being cast in a role.
Ezra Furman
I wrote ‘My Teeth Hurt’ in April 2018 when my teeth hurt and I didn’t have dental insurance.
Ezra Furman
My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.
Ezra Furman
My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.
Ezra Furman
I think I’m gradually becoming a more politically aware person.
Ezra Furman
Sometimes there’s a day where I don’t feel good being out in the world, and I feel unsafe in the world in general. And an anxiety about just showing up in the world. It’s kind of irrational, but people do say things to me out in the street about how I’m dressed.
Ezra Furman
Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken soc

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.
Ezra Furman
I wear what I want to wear and appear on stage as myself.
Ezra Furman
I’m not an actor.
Ezra Furman
I’m a big fan of Louis CK – I think he’s a master of standup.
Ezra Furman
Just being gender non-conforming opens you to trouble from strangers. And violence.
Ezra Furman
I take it hard whenever anything happens that makes, I guess, queer people feel less safe and less welcome in the world.
Ezra Furman
I’ve been writing songs since I was a teenager, so one kind of song I’ve written a lot is about, I don’t know, teen angst feelings – feeling unsure of yourself and immature.
Ezra Furman
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully explain the way that the Velvet Underground’s records opened a door in my head. But it has something to do with Lou Reed as a mythic figure: a person who fitted no category, who defied limits and trends and definitions.
Ezra Furman
I get stage fright really bad sometimes, so touring has been hard on me in a lot of ways. But despite that, I love performing.
Ezra Furman
My favourite artists are the ones who are human, and you know they’re not in a failure-proof environment.
Ezra Furman
I love it when people write rapturously about music they love.
Ezra Furman
It’s always about staying competitive with myself… Popularity is something that may happen from time to time, and I don’t trust it and I don’t think it means too much. I’m going for greatness.
Ezra Furman
I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn’t get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn’t interested in having to follow.
Ezra Furman
If you’re trying to deal with being a marginalized person and trying to confront a larger population that isn’t the same as you, you can be friendly about it, and invite everybody in, or you can be angry about it and be hostile and attack the systems that you want to destabilize.
Ezra Furman
To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world’s worldview.
Ezra Furman
I really don’t care about what anyone says unless they are also gender-nonconforming. Then I really listen. I love the solidarity felt between us gender failures.
Ezra Furman
I always maintain that artists do not have any responsibility to do anything except cause no harm and do whatever we want to do as artists.
Ezra Furman
More visibility is more power, but more vulnerability.
Ezra Furman
I grew up attending a Conservative day school, Solomon Schechter, until I was about 14, and going to a Reconstructionist synagogue.
Ezra Furman